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[Enginoor] is on a quest. He wants to get into the world of 3D printing, but isn’t content to run off little toys and trinkets. If he’s going to print something, he wants it to be something practical and ideally be something he couldn’t have made quickly and easily with more traditional methods. Accordingly, he’s come out the gate with a fairly strong showing: a magnetic Maxwell kinematic coupling camera mount.

If you only recognized some of those terms, don’t feel bad. Named for its creator James Clerk Maxwell who came up with the design in 1871, the Maxwell kinematic coupling is self-orienting connection that lends itself to applications that need a positive connection while still being quick and easy to remove. Certainly that sounds like a good way to stick a camera on a tripod to us.

But the Maxwell design, which consists of three groves and matching hemispheres, is only half of the equation. It allows [enginoor] to accurately and repeatably line the camera up, but it doesn’t have any holding power of its own. That’s where the magnets come in. By designing pockets into both parts, he was able to install strong magnets in the mating faces. This gives the mount a satisfying “snap” when attaching that he trusts it enough to hold his Canon EOS 70D and lens.

[enginoor] says he could have made the holes a bit tighter for the magnets (thereby skipping the glue he’s using currently), but otherwise his first 3D printed design was a complete success. He sent this one off to Shapeways to be printed, but in the future he’s considering taking the reins himself if he can keep coming up with ideas worth committing to plastic.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: It may sit in the shade of China and India, but tech has real growth potential in Southeast Asia. Home to a cumulative 650 million people, the region’s digital economy is forecast to triple in size and reach $240 billion over the next seven years, according to Google’s third “e-Conomy SEA” report. The annual study, which is authored by Google and Singapore sovereign fund Temasek and is arguably the most comprehensive research program for tech in Southeast Asia, has raised its estimation for the size of the digital economy in 2025 from an initial $200 billion after seeing the region reach “an inflection point.”

Southeast Asia has 350 million internet users across its six largest countries — that’s more than the entire U.S. population — and the latest data suggests its internet economy will reach $72 billion this year, up from $50 billion last year and $19.1 billion in 2015. Online travel accounts for the majority of that revenue ($30 billion) ahead of e-commerce ($23 billion), online media ($11 billion) and ride-hailing ($8 billion), and that rough breakdown is likely to be maintained up until 2025, according to the report. Indonesia, the world’s fourth largest country by population, is forecast to hit $100 billion by 2025, ahead of Thailand ($43 billion) and Vietnam ($33 billion), with strong growth forecast across the board. Indonesia and Vietnam, in particular, have seen their respective digital economies more than triple since 2015, according to the data.

A kidney was flown thousands of meters by a drone without incurring any damage. Reader Wave723 shares a report: When a patient who needs an organ transplantation is finally matched with a donor, every second matters. A longer wait between when an organ is removed from a donor and when it is placed into a recipient is associated with poorer organ function following transplantation. To maximize the chances of success, organs must be shipped from A to B as quickly and safely as possible — and a recent test run suggests that drones are up to the task. […] Last March, they (Dr. Joseph Scalea of the University of Maryland Medical Center and his team) received news that a kidney — which was not healthy enough to be used in a transplantation — was available for research. Over the course of roughly 24 hours, the kidney was shipped more than 1,600 kilometers (km) to Baltimore and the drone was set up for its first delivery mission. The results were published in the IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine on 6 November.

In total, the little bean-shaped organ was airborne for a little more than an hour over the course of 14 flight missions. For the farthest mission, the kidney flew 2,415 meters, a distance similar to the length of potential shipment routes for donor organs between inner city hospitals. The researchers found that the temperature of the kidney remained stable, at a cool 2.5 degrees Celsius, throughout the test runs. Air pressure corresponded with altitude, and the drone-borne organ achieved a maximum speed of 67.6 km/h. In an interesting twist, the kidney was subjected to slightly fewer vibrations when transported in the drone compared to a control delivery mission in a fixed wing plane (a dual engine turboprop King Air). Biopsies of the kidney before and after drone transportation revealed no damage from the journey, suggesting that the experiment — which the research team believes is the first ever use of a drone for organ delivery — was a success.